


Opening Up

by Magik3



Series: Katyana Future Middle-Age [8]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Bondage, F/F, Fisting, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Sex Toys, Tails, Tickling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2018-12-29 22:52:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12095193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magik3/pseuds/Magik3
Summary: In the Future Middle-Age, some years into their relationship, after they've been married for a while, Kitty and Illyana come across a few reasons it might be a good idea to have a somewhat open relationship. They propose an experiment, parts of which go exceedingly well.





	1. Bad at Love

**Author's Note:**

> The irony is not lost on me that in the first three chapters of a work about polyamory, the only sex happens between the married couple. There will be future chapters with at least one rather surprising hook up.

Here’s the sum total of our talking about our sexual histories before we got married:  
  
Kitty asked, “How many people have you had sex with?” late at night after we’d been out at a fundraiser thing and we’d both had more to drink than we planned. Oh and we’d been stuck in a long car ride with Psylocke, which always made things weird.  
  
We’d gotten into bed. Neither of us had enough brain power to read, things were too weird for having sex, and we weren’t quite settled down enough to sleep. Why this seemed like a good time for Kitty to start taking about the sex we’d had with other people, I do not know. There’s a good chance her brain jumps around more than mine.  
  
I was on my back, propped up on a few pillows. Lying next to me on her side, Kitty was playing with my fingers, eyes half closed not in the “I’m too sleepy to keep them open” way, but more like “I wish I could close them all the way but I can’t yet.”  
  
She asked, “How many people have you had sex with?”

I took a minute to process this question, curled my fingers more around hers and said, “Define ‘sex.’”  
  
“It’s a little scary when that’s the first thing you say.”  
  
She might’ve had a point. But people say “scary” way too often about things I say and I’d been stalling, so I shrugged and asked, “Why? How many have you?”  
  
“Twelve.”  
  
Of course she’d know off the top of her head. She probably had a list somewhere. Annotated. With footnotes and citations. (I kind of wanted to see it. Especially my footnotes.)  
  
“Counting Piotr only once, right?” I asked, annoyed at how her life seemed easier than mine in this area. It probably wasn’t. And there was a moderate chance I was being a jerk.  
  
“Oh wow, I should _not_ have brought this up,” she said.  
  
She’d stopped moving her fingers around mine, so I picked up her hand and brought it closer to me, half resting on my thigh.  
  
“It’s okay,” I said. “The sticking point for me is that I’ve been to some parties, you know, where people are having sex, so does it count if we’re all in the same room or did we have to be touching?”  
  
“Touching,” Kitty said. “And trying to get them off.”  
  
“Okay, give me a minute.”  
  
“I really should not have brought this up. Sex parties? Did you have fun?” she asked.  
  
“Usually. Otherwise it would be singular: sex party. And mostly clubs, not house parties, those can get weird.”  
  
“Because you’ve been to those too?” her question had a rising incredulity to it.  
  
I didn’t figure I had to answer that, or that I should. “When you say ‘touching’ do you mean skin contact? Does it count if there’s a lot of apparatus involved?”  
  
“Were you trying to get them off?” she asked.  
  
“Sometimes,” I said.  
  
“Then those times count theoretically as part of the number that I really now do _not_ want to know.”  
  
We both got quiet for a while, her fingers moving restlessly on my leg, and then she said, “Okay, tell me.”  
  
“The way I’d count it, I’d say seventeen, but if you include all that other stuff it’s about thirty.”  
  
“How many people have you dated?” she asked.  
  
“You should’ve started there. Five and a half.”  
  
“You dated a half person?”  
  
“Half-dated but in some ways she might also count as a half person. Is that a quarter, then? How many have you?”  
  
“Eightish. Counting Peter once because, you know, he’s just one person. So you’ve had sex with, like, six times more people than you’ve dated?” she asked.  
  
I couldn’t tell how I felt about that, hearing it said that way. Badass, yes, but also sad. Not about the amount of sex, but about the ratio, about the proof that I was bad at dating and probably at relationships as well.  
  
I tried for a response that split the difference between badass and sad, “What can I say? I’m cute. And you’ve dated more people than me.”  
  
“Are you going to get bored with me?” she asked, worried creases on her forehead.  
  
“No,” I told her. “And so far you seem to put up with me pretty well. So the more interesting question might be, if our sex life ever gets a little stale, will you come to party or club with me?”  
  
A very long silence from her—or at least it felt very long to me—and then. “Yeah, actually, that could be fun.”  
  
“Then we have nothing to worry about. Unless you meet someone there who you like better than me and I have to kill them.”  
  
“You wouldn’t just invite them home for a threeway?”  
  
“Threeways are only happening with people you find marginally tolerable. Not anyone you like better than me.”  
  
“There’s no one I like better than you,” she said and snuggled against me. I curled around her and kissed the top of her head.  
  
“I like everything we do so much better than the parties and the clubs,” I told her. Quieter and slower because it was hard to say, I mumbled against the top of her head, “Katya, I’ve done things just to get away from myself. Done things simply because I wanted a distraction. I didn’t hate doing it, but I didn’t like it enough to do again. Sometimes inside my head isn’t a place I want to be, but then some of those times, the people, what we did, I’m not proud of it. Not ashamed either, just, now, at this distance, when I look back, I’m sad. I wish I had known some other way to take care of myself.”  
  
She spread her hand on my chest, over my heart. “Love, you did a really good job taking care of yourself. Sad is important to feel, but I don’t think you have to regret any of that.”  
  
“I do, though. I wish I hadn’t made so many mistakes.”  
  
“Aren’t you the one who’s always telling the kids that’s how you learn.”  
  
I sighed, grinned a little at her quoting me back to myself. “I like better the mistakes I’ve made with my clothes on. Well, some of them. Not the really big ones. It is easier to make really big mistakes with your clothes on. Hmm. Maybe I should wear clothing less often.”  
  
“I’m having a hard time arguing with that.”


	2. Re: Your Wife

When Kitty needs to TALK to me, it starts one of two ways:

  * If she’s dressed cute, it means she wants something and I’m probably going to say yes.
  * If she’s in work clothes, it means she’s mad at me.



But she was in a sweatshirt in bed, so I really had no idea what was happening tonight. She sat propped up against a bunch of pillows with her cute computer glasses sliding down her nose, frowning at her screen. At least the sweatshirt was an old one from the school that I usually wore.  
  
“Hey, would you come look at this?” she asked and turned her laptop toward me.  
  
I’d been standing in the bathroom doorway brushing my teeth, which was not my best look. At least I was in shorts and a threadbare t-shirt. But still, I was worried because of her tone and the frown that hadn’t gone away.  
  
I spat out the toothpaste and went to look—and worried a lot more when I saw she’d been reading an email from Grey.  
  
_Re: Your Wife_  
  
_She’s not going to tell you this, but she gets unbearable when you’re gone for more than three weeks. As a friend, please handle that before you go away to space again._  
  
_Last time she broke a danger room. From the inside._  
  
_Best, RG_  
  
Kitty gave me enough time to start thinking about all that and asked, “You actually broke one of the new danger rooms? From the inside? I didn’t think that was possible.”  
  
“I didn’t mean to,” I said, realizing after the words were out that this made it worse.  
  
“How? Are you going to say ‘magic?’ You don’t get to just say ‘magic’ for everything. It’s not an explanation.”  
  
“It kind of is,” I said. I’d been sitting half-perched on the side of the bed and considered backing slowly away and teleporting to Limbo, but Kitty didn’t seem as mad as I expected. More worried. Also, even though I can explain everything by saying "magic," I can't fix everything by teleporting to Limbo. (Let's not discuss how long it took me to learn that.)  
  
“Is 'magic' the real answer?” She pushed her glasses further down her nose and then took them off completely.  
  
I tried to explain with: “Magic, vodka, I didn’t think it would bend that way, my incomplete grasp of physics, the fickle nature of time travel and … I don’t quite remember the last part but Danger said it was a spectacular disaster. I apologized to her a lot and cleaned up most of it. As proof, you didn’t even know.”  
  
She closed her laptop and put it on the side table, before asking, “What does Rachel mean about you being unbearable?”  
  
I pushed off the bed and paced a few steps away before I could say, “I get … um, the right word is probably … depressed? In an agitated way. I can’t settle. I can’t really work. It feels like all the time I’m chewing on metal.”  
  
“Why didn’t you tell me?”  
  
“I’ve been working on it. It took a few times for me to realize how off I was and then I went to Strange to see if it was magic and he said my energy gets stagnant. Because I … uh …”  
  
“Go on,” she said, but I really didn’t want to. I didn’t see this coming out well. I stood by the dresser and moved things around on its top, like that was important.  
  
I wasn’t going to tell her not to go to space. She loved exploring and aliens and finding new things she could trade for and bring back to earth. I loved most of the stuff she brought back. And her independence, and (a little) missing her and then seeing her again. Though I could have missed her less and still been delighted.  
  
“Because of the way I learned magic,” I told her without turning around. “So much all at once, not right for my age, and with me close to and then in puberty. No matter how hard I try, I still use the sexual channels in my body to do magic so when I’m not having sex there's excess magical energy in my system. But I’m working on it. I’ve got some new meditation techniques.”  
  
“Are they working?”  
  
“Not yet,” I admitted.  
  
The bed creaked as she got up. I felt her move behind me, lean into my back with her cheek on my shoulder. I reached behind me, found her hands, pulled them around my waist.  
  
Kitty asked, “So if you’re not having sex about every three weeks, that extra energy stagnates, you get angry-depressed and break things, spectacularly?”  
  
“Two,” I said. “Two weeks is ideal. Three is kind of an outer limit.”  
  
“Wait, have we had sex at least every two weeks for the last eight years?” she asked. Her tone suggested she was actually trying to remember/calculate the answer.  
  
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not all the time. But it doesn’t matter as much when there’s a lot of fighting. If I’m using big magic a lot, that maintains my energy’s movement. Lately it’s been quiet. I’m teaching, doing demonstrations, all these small magics.”  
  
“And you tried doing big magic in the danger room and broke it?”  
  
I nodded.  
  
“What counts?” she asked. “Like any sex?”  
  
Weird enough question that I turned in her arms and looked at her. Her expression mixed curiosity and possibly mischief? What?  
  
“How would I know? Everything you and I have done counts,” I told her.  
  
She pulled away, caught my hand and drew me back to the bed with her. I let her settle and then bunched up my pillows and put an arm around her.  
  
“You’re thinking,” I said.  
  
“I’m always thinking. But I’m wondering if maybe you want to try and find out if … I mean, while I’m gone …”  
  
I scooted back far enough to peer around at her face, my hand still on her shoulder. “You want me to have sex with someone else while you’re in space and let you know how it goes? … Wait, you have that look. Do you want to have sex with someone else? In space? If it’s Quill, I will fucking break more than a danger room.”  
  
“No. No way,” she said. “Why would you even say that?”  
  
“I’m sorry, I’m … this is hard. And you do want something, don’t you?”  
  
She sighed and tugged on my arm so I came close again. She curled into me and got littler. Even though she’s an inch taller than me in bare feet, under my arm she felt much smaller than me. Maybe it was an extension of her phasing, something she'd learned from being immaterial. She did it when she was feeling delicate or wanted to be protected and it worked, I wanted to protect her, take care of her. I tightened my arm around her, kissed her temple.  
  
Kitty explained, “Next trip out I’m supposed to negotiate with some aliens who have certain expectations. There’s a royal family and I might have, years ago, slept with the prince because, well I wanted to and he’s delightful, but also it’s a part of the trade relationship. So he’s going to expect that, for everything to go well, he’s going to ask if I want to. And I wasn’t going to bring it up, but if this helps you and also is good for me, then maybe?”  
  
“You want to have sex with him?” I asked.  
  
“What if I sort of do but it’s complicated?”  
  
“Explain it to me,” I said, having to work a little at being patient, but also caught up in her awkward, squirming. Kitty is not nearly as vanilla as her professorial blazers would have you think. Not by quite a margin. And so far I'd liked everything I'd found in that margin.  
  
“I like him and … also he’s not really a him, he just uses that pronoun when dealing with humans. And he’ll tell me a lot more if I do hook up him and then everything will go well, which means we get a bunch of funding and cool tech. You know how I feel about cool tech. Ugh, that makes me sound so mercenary. The problem is that it’s not the same out there. It’s not the same culture as anything on Earth. I’m used to, I mean before you and I got back together, I just did whatever occurred at the intersection of fun and smart.”  
  
She was blushing and turning her face down and away, which made her very cute, though that didn’t completely negate the disturbing content she was saying.  
  
“Sounds like you,” I said.  
  
“And you know I have a thing about aliens. You should see his … okay, maybe not. Anyway, it didn’t used to mean the same as here, except maybe now it does. You know I wouldn’t … but we didn’t really talk about … can I please stop talking now and you talk?”  
  
Kitty and I had both lived in a variety of cultural settings. I didn’t like being in space, hadn’t spent much time there, but I’d been in other dimensions and other futures. I’d found that I liked a wider range of play in my relationships than I’d known was possible when Kitty and I were teens together.  
  
But then I hadn’t been with anyone about whom I’d felt as possessive as I did with Kitty.  She was mine, had to be mine, would always be mine. And maybe that extended into whatever else we tried together. Maybe she was mine no matter what. I supposed we could try this. If we didn’t like it, we didn’t have to do it again. At least I wouldn’t be repairing a danger room by hand while painfully hung over.  
  
I pulled her closer, wrapped both arms around her. “I hate the idea of anyone else touching you. But I very much like the idea of reclaiming you when you come home.”  
  
“Oh,” she said and shivered against me. “Oh could we … do you want to practice that? Like right now?”  
  
I tightened my grip on her but did not put a hand up under her sweatshirt like I wanted. We had to be clear about this.  
  
“I do, but first let’s make sure we understand. You’re going into space to have sex with some prince and while you’re gone I’m going to do something and then we’ll talk and see how it worked and decide if we do this again?”  
  
“What something?” she asked.  
  
“ _Now_ you’re jealous?” I asked, smirking.  
  
“You bet I am.” She put her palm on my chest and pushed back a few inches so she could look at my face as she asked, “What kind of something?”  
  
“Leather bar, probably. I’m not that into strangers so maybe I’ll just get off watching other people having sex. I’m curious to see how the energy works if I’m alone in a group.”  
  
“Why do you sound like you’ve done this before?” she asked and then said, “Spiral” like her name was a curse word.  
  
“She liked parties,” I said.  
  
Kitty put her hand up in the “don’t tell me” gesture.  
  
I shrugged. “How about we do this and afterward you can ask me anything you want?”  
  
“Does that mean we can get to the practicing part?” she asked, squirming close to me again in a very distracting way.  
  
There are many great things about practice. Chiefly, in this case, that you’re supposed to do it more than once.  



	3. Summary of Findings

I was in very short shorts and boots and a t-shirt hauling boxes down from the attic when Kitty texted me: _I miss you. I’m ready to come home._  
  
She’d been gone for almost a month and I teleported out to get her without thinking about it. Many of my teleports go awry, but never the ones that lead me to Kitty. And I’d been practicing very long-distance teleports, so I managed it without even making myself sick.  
  
A step through Limbo and then I arrived on some large, open deck of a vast Shi’ar cruiser. Kitty leapt up from her seat and hugged me. A conspicuous silence surrounded us. When I looked up from burying my face in Kitty’s hair I saw three dozen Shi’ar dignitaries staring at me. Kitty moved back a half step and looked down my body. Ratty old sleeveless t-shirt over a sports bra, very short denim cutoffs and heavy calf boots with many buckles.  
  
“Did you wear that to the leather bar?” she asked.  
  
“No, I wore assless chaps,” I deadpanned.  
  
“You did?”  
  
“Of course not. And this is what I wear to clean the attic,” I told her.  
  
“Those boots? Never mind, I don’t know why I’m asking. My real question is: _those shorts_?”  
  
“Laundry day. Shall we go home? Or do you need to translate cut-offs so the Shi’ar can add it to their wardrobe machine?”  
  
“Home,” she said and waved good-bye at the others.  
  
I took us directly to our bedroom. The bedside clock said it was only an hour after I’d left.  
  
I cupped Kitty’s face in my hands and kissed her. I’d missed her terribly, especially knowing at any given point in the night or day—because I wasn’t sure of the time difference to the part of the galaxy where she’d been—she might be in some alien prince’s bed. Or whatever they fucked in. Could’ve been some cold-ass cosmic egg thing for all I knew. I hoped it had been.  
  
Kitty kissed me back in that coiled-spring way that I love, that means she missed me as much as I missed her. But when she put her hand on my stomach under my shirt, I felt the stickiness of my sweaty skin.  
  
“I’m yucky,” I said. “Come shower with me.”  
  
She raised her eyebrows, followed me into our bathroom, smiling. I turned on the water and stripped. Kitty phased out of her clothes and stepped into the shower behind me.  
  
Under the spray, turned away from her, I asked, “Did you have your prince?”  
  
“Um, yes. Did you have something?”  
  
“More or less. A woman whose name I didn’t quite get jerked off with me while we watched guys fucking each other.”  
  
“Guys? Really?”  
  
I could understand her disbelief. I’d never really wanted to date a man. I’d flirt with them sometimes, but that was more for amusement when I was younger.  
  
I explained, “I’m not emotionally invested in men. I can just watch the sex and not think about it."

"Did it work?" she asked.

"It wasn't nearly as good as if you'd been there, or here, but I didn't break anything. How was yours?”  
  
“It was … unobjectionable.”  
  
I laughed so hard I got shampoo in my mouth. When I was done spitting, I turned back to Kitty, put my hands on her hips. “You can tell me if it was good.”  
  
“I missed you,” she said. “It was fast and then I just missed you. All night.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
I turned us so she was under the spray and kissed her. Was it worse that she’d been kissed by some space prince days ago? Better? Neither. Did not matter because she was back and mine and about to be very much mine.  
  
I soaped a washcloth intending to teasingly wash her, but she got one too and then it was soapy washcloth wrestling and kissing each other, laughing as our soaped bodies slipped against each other.  
  
She shut off the water and wrapped a towel around me. I got a towel around her and used it to pull us, stumbling to the bed.  
  
“Wet hair,” she protested, so I shoved her. Only hard enough for her to fall back on the bed. And for her eyes to get very wide. And so she knew better than to protest.  
  
I followed her onto the bed, kissing hard, pushing her back toward the center. Grabbed a handful of her wet hair in my fist and crushed her mouth against mine, touched everywhere with my tongue until she was whimpering against my lips. I bit the sides of her neck and along her collarbones, working down to her breasts. A long time there, rough with my hands but delicate with my mouth until her nipples were ripe and hard and straining, sending jolts into all her nerves.  
  
I felt her shift, her hand moving lower and grabbed her wrist. My other hand went around her throat.  
  
One of the many delights of being in bed with Kitty is that she has built in consent—anything that’s over the line, she will simply phase out of. And she did not phase away from my hand, even when my fingers pressed into the side of her neck.  
  
Sitting back enough to see her face, I said, “You don’t have permission for that.”  
  
Eyes widening, very dark in the center with pleasure-dilated pupils. “What?”  
  
“You don’t come until I say you can.”  
  
I let go of her wrist and pinched one nipple until her back arched.  
  
“Are you going to be a good girl and prove you’re mine?” I asked.  
  
She nodded.  
  
“No matter what I do?” I asked.  
  
Then she looked scared. “What if I can’t?”  
  
“I trust you,” I said.  
  
I let go of her throat, and her nipple, and went to the dresser. She pushed up on her elbows to watch, chest rising and falling fast, her nipples looking almost bruised from my attentions and no less hard than when I’d left the bed.  
  
I got the toys I was looking for and a few other things I might want. And towels. I had a plan.  
  
“Hands and knees,” I told her. “Or elbows and knees, your pick.”  
  
She started on her hands, turning her head to watch as I put on one of the bigger toys.  
  
On the bed, behind her, I made sure she felt the bigness, the heaviness of it, pressing the thick tip against her opening, sliding up and down, pushing between her legs to rub it over her clit, until she was rubbing back against me.  
  
I lubed up and went in a little way. With a whimpered moan, she pushed back and took most of it—of me inside her. I moved in and out slowly for a minute, made sure she was good with all the way in. She’d slipped to her elbows, face turned to the side. I could see part of one of her eyes: unfocused, dreamy, trusting.  
  
Moving deeper, my hands on her hips, I liked the sounds she made. Mostly helpless desire and intermittent louder gasps of surprise. I wanted her to feel all of this, but not too hard, no hurting—only to feel the contrast of this hard fullness and her being delicate. She isn’t always, can be incredibly tough when she needs to, but I liked her to never need to with me.  
  
And the feeling of vulnerable, open—relaxing into it, relaxing back against me. I moved steady until she was quiet, her muscles more loose than tense, and then faster, hard enough to make sure she wasn’t thinking of anything else. The sensation taking over her body and mind.  
  
Her hand drifted down toward her clit and I caught her wrist with my tail, drew her hand away.  
  
“Please,” she said.  
  
“Shh, not yet.”  
  
I went back to the slow, steady fucking. Held her hand down against the blanket with my tail. She knew better than to try to use her other hand. I went on until it was almost too much for me. Until I wanted to come inside her so much that my teeth ached.  
  
I pulled out and she whimpered, rubbed her face against the blanket in frustration, her hands knotting in the loose fabric. She was already dripping wet, but I wanted more. Only a few times recently had I been able to make her squirt in bed. New discovery for both of us. I loved it and she seemed to (as long as she could also be shocked with an edge of prim dismay) love it just as much. Hadn’t quite figured out what the magic combination was, but it definitely included her getting fucked a lot and teased. And if I could pull this off tonight, I wanted her facing me. I wanted to be between her legs.  
  
“Roll over and sit up,” I told her.  
  
She did, too hazy with need and pleasure to worry about the wild mess of her hair.  
  
I had that toy off and a vibrator in my hand. Moved until I was in front of her, my clit near hers and put the vibrator down between us.  
  
“Oh, oh.” Her eyes very wide and then grabbing my shoulders, her body shaking. “Please, can I?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Ilya, I have to.”  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
“Then you have to stop. That’s … oh, please.”  
  
I put my free hand around the back of her neck, gripping hard, the other rubbing the vibrator maddeningly between us. My tail stayed wrapped around her wrist, looser now, more comfort than restraint. I had my teeth clenched against the need to come and could only wonder how difficult this had to be for Kitty. She was being extremely good and I told her in many different, gasping, ways.  
  
She bent her head forward and I touched my forehead to hers. Both of us had our mouths open, breathing very hard.  
  
“You’re mine,” I told her.  
  
“Yes.” She only said it once, because it was obvious, because that word carried the full force of her certainty.  
  
I unwrapped my tail from her wrist.  
  
“Then come for me.”  
  
She caught the handle of the vibrator, fingers over mine and tilted it, head under her clit. Body leaned back, head back, chest up and heaving, her voice making a string of breathy “oh” sounds, rising in volume.  
  
A stream of hot liquid from under her clit, between her lips, arced up and sprayed across my belly—and I was coming so hard I couldn’t breathe. I forced my eyes to keep focus, watching another spurt from her, almost to my breasts. Wanting to freeze that moment: seeing the liquid spurt out and then feeling it land hot across my skin and drip slowly, maddeningly down my body. The next coated the underside of my breasts, and then a small one, a little curving stream across my lower belly and clit as I came again—head back, throat open, making sounds like pain but meaning the opposite.  
  
Kitty leaned on her elbows, blushing, not looking me in the eye but very much examining the glistening wetness on my chest and belly. Layers of expression on her face: genuine surprise, uncertainty or even worry that space-faring lady headmaster ninjas shouldn’t do this, concern about how proud she was feeling, and determination to enjoy all of it.  
  
No one else got to see this aspect of her. So many parts of her were only for me and we kept finding new ones, in each of us.  
  
I put a hand between my legs, gathered my thick wetness with my fingers and lunged forward to paint it from Kitty’s breastbone to her pubic bone. She laughed, caught my hand at the bottom of the down-stroke and put my fingers in her mouth.  
  
I chased my fingers with my mouth, kissing her, pressing her back against the bed. She wriggled against me, the wet on her skin sliding in the wet on mine.  
  
“You’re mine too,” she whispered in the space between kisses.  
  
“Always,” I told her.  
  



	4. Phoenix vs Demon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just when you think the whole poly thing's going to be easy, Illyana breaks a primary rule. Completely by accident, of course, and to save the world, or at least part of it.

So then Grey and I ended up being fuck buddies, which was not at all what I expected since I wanted to kill her for a few years—including some of the years we were fucking. That's too abrupt a start, isn't it? I should tell you how that started, but then you might get confused because this is, in the end, a story about Kitty.  
  
Well, perhaps a story about Kitty and me and Grey.  
  
Grey is deeply screwed up. Like me but not like me. Probably because she's a telepath and she's always hearing everybody's shit and most of the time she can't tell where her shit ends and someone else's shit begins. You know, on top of all that mutant-hunting Hound trauma and the timeline bullshit. When we really settled into the expanded school and got it outfitted right, got her a room that blocked telepathy, she slept for a week. And she got quieter in a way that was weirdly peaceful. Like any brash loudness she had going on before was to drown out the voices, not like when I'm loud because it feels good or because someone's being an ass and they need to know it.  
  
Kitty was off planet a lot a few years ago, negotiating with whatever factions to keep the school more than funded and brimming with the best tech. I can practice sorcery and do paperwork for two, maybe three weeks before I become a huge pain in the ass to everyone around me. And that's only because I'm a fucking grownup now, more or less. So Kitty agreed that when it got that point, instead of picking fights, I should get laid. We fought about the details some, but worked it out well enough. No having sex with anyone in our bedroom (of course), no bragging (who would do that?), no doing anything so kinky I wouldn't do it with Kitty … that's one part we had to fight over — not that I wouldn't do it with her, but our tastes diverged in a few areas and it wasn't fun if she didn't like it.  
  
And: no having sex with anyone Kitty had had sex with. Which I thought was going to be a piece of cake and … wasn’t.  
  
I also called certain activities off limits — some fighting there too because I do not like the idea of my girl being touched by tentacles. Not sure that she does either, but she can get pretty stubborn and dug in on theoretical issues: the right to tentacles more than the actual.  
  
I was not planning on Grey. Not at all. I liked how fucked up she was and how badly she hid it. And I hated her for having been with Kitty while I’d been dead. And I loved messing with her. She pissed me off about all the time because she could be so self-righteous arrogant (don’t you dare say “like you”). She had a telepathic stick up her telepathic ass — sideways. I didn't figure we'd be good together.  
  
But then Grey lost it. Partly because the alien robot invasion creatures reminded her of something from her future past, but also because their giant spaceship tried to melt her down with a solar laser barrage that was too close to the Phoenix power.  
  
She ate the power and sent it back at them. Dropped the whole ship half a mile from the school, flew over to it and kept disintegrating it with her face all scary tattoos, not the prettied up version she wears day-to-day.  
  
Kurt and I teleported out to where she’s dropped the ship and she had that big old Phoenix nimbus all around her. He said a bunch of stuff in German that, if I’d put it in Russian, would’ve sounded like: _Sweet Mother of Mercy redeem us, we are fucked in our faces and screwed through our skulls and back again._  
  
That first part he actually said, the second was my embellishment. Kurt’s been dead and alive and to heaven and back, so when he looks scared, we’re all scared.  
  
“I’ll take her,” I said.  
  
“You are both coming back, yes?”  
  
“That’s my plan.”  
  
"You have a plan?"  
  
“More of an idea. But it's plannish," I said.  
  
The ground under Grey’s feet was melting, so I spun up every anti-fire spell I had and ported to her. Grabbing her, I took us both to Limbo. With her all Phoenix, I wouldn’t have to worry about stray demons hassling us, and if she went mini-nuke, she wouldn’t take out the school or any nearby towns. (And hopefully not me, if the spells held, which they should, but then again, Phoenix.)  
  
I picked a spot way out in the wilds because some of those demons I’d gotten to know well over the decades and I didn’t want collateral damage. Scraggly trees dotted low hills. Grey turned and blasted me into the side of the nearest hill. My armor took the damage, but I was embedded in the dirt and stones. I worked myself loose, gearing up to fight until she wore out. At least she didn’t have my stamina.  
  
And yeah, I was also watching her walk toward me with that glowing power all around her, and her chest heaving, that long coat, really cute knee-high boots, her shirt burned through in a few places. She was just starting to get a curve of belly on her and it was really lovely. Grey's one of those women, like Kitty, who was super cute young but somewhere in her late 30s got stupid hot. Or maybe that was me changing as I passed 40 so I'd keep losing my mind over women my own age.  
  
Physically, all I got was a little wider, bit more muscle, can't see the gray in my hair. Rach's hair got darker red-brown and as her face got leaner, it was all, boom! structural beauty. She didn't keep the hint of cute that Kitty did — but I could start to see why all the guys got idiotic over Jean. Rachel Grey's face had developed some kind of carved cathedral arch elegance that you wanted to keep looking at until you saw the face of God.  
  
I stopped staring at her long enough to finish digging myself out of the hill, called my sword, waited for her to make a move. She threw fire at me. I deflected. I'd have hit her with the sword but it's not great for trauma, only possession and generalized madness.  
  
“Grey, dammit, I want to give you the beatdown you deserve, but you need to stop fighting, you’re being a huge twat!” I yelled.  
  
She paused a step. Not bad. She could at least partially hear me and register what I was saying. She wasn't all Phoenix and traumatic flashback.  
  
I used the pause to reinforce all my spells: anti-fire and anti-telepath. Another volley of fire, so hot and cosmic it seared right through the first few layers of spells. If this kept up, I’d have to start running.  
  
“Rachel Grey, can you fucking hear me?” I shouted. “It’s me, Professor Magik. Illyana Rasputin. You think I’m an asshole. I tease you about watching _Grey’s Anatomy_   because you like Lexie Grey, who is the least hot Grey of all the Greys ever, including your brother.”  
  
“Brother?” she asked and then screamed, head back, inhuman, screeching universe-destroying bird-scream.  
  
I said untranslatable things. Vaguely, but less poetic than in Russian: <I have fuck-dug my own grave with a bag full of cocks and a stupid goat and will be laid to rest with only a bull’s scrotum for a shroud.>  
  
And Grey was still screaming, down on her knees, hands out, flaming wings around her.  
  
I’d had a fraction of the Phoenix power in me and it was beyond overwhelming. Good news: I could channel it a bit. I had to pull some of that fire out of her. But, bad news,  the only way I’d learned to do it was my way. By default, my way used the sexual channels inside my body because they were fast, efficient and fun.  
  
Strange kept telling me I needed to work on some backup channels. So I guess if I survived this, I owed him a fucking fruit basket because this was going to get all manner of awkward.  
  
I put the sword away, kept the armor and walked to Grey. With each step, I made the fire-resist magic stronger but took down the anti-telepath bits. She’d have to come into me a bit for this to work. That sounded exactly as dirty, wrong and ill-advised as it was.  
  
I crouched down, took her lower jaw in my fingers and tugged gently so she opened her mouth more. Ran my thumb along her lower lip, pushed slowly across the line of her teeth until the tip touched her tongue. She did not bite me or spit out my finger. Very good sign.  
  
She flicked the tip of her tongue against my thumb and a blazing jolt of heat seared through my chest and gut, settled between my legs.  
  
“Give me some,” I said, put my mouth on hers and inhaled cosmic fire.  
  
It went right to the root of my body and burned up the inside of my spine. I pushed as much as I could out through the channels in my arms and legs, fought to ground some of it. Limbo itself was reaching up to me, trying to help.  
  
Grey's hand clamped on the back of my neck and crushed my mouth against her as she exhaled into me. Fire within fire. White-hot everything.  
  
I was falling and she dragged me forward to sit across her lap.  
  
"Grey, bad idea," I gasped, but her eyes were twin suns.  
  
Fighting this would only get me hurt and I didn't want to fight. All that power. I grabbed her upper arms to keep myself upright and opened myself from my base to the top of my head.  
  
“Go ahead. I can take you,” I said. In retrospect, this was a mistake.  
  
Everything went to fire with only the thinnest lattice of world around me, holding me together through the raging inferno of pain and destruction. The inside of me wide open from base to head and only the white fire of creation itself.  
  
If we hadn’t been in Limbo, I couldn’t have done it.  
  
I screamed for a long time.  
  
I came back fully conscious slumped against Grey, her arms around me. I was sobbing from the pain, face pressed into her shoulder and she was … kissing the side of my head?  
  
Her lips felt warm but not melt-the-earth hot.  
  
"You okay?" I whispered.  
  
She laughed darkly. "You're asking me? You just screamed for longer than I thought a person could without passing out. A lot longer.”  
  
I said: Без муки нет науки. <Without torture, no science.>  
  
"That's messed up," Grey said.  
  
"You understood that? My spells are gone?”  
  
“All burned away. You're an open book. Or, um, an open … " she looked down at where my legs were open around her body.  
  
I followed her gaze with mine and a shudder of need went through me. I was so raw inside that I needed something to ground me and for whatever perverse reasons—like she was here, and we were in Limbo, and I was crawling out of my skin with lust because I’d just had a supernova blow through my kundalini—she seemed just the person to do that.  
  
"Telepathic mindfuck?" I asked. I'd meant to use more words, but I wasn't thinking too well.  
  
"Not sure what that means," she said and nuzzled the side of my neck. “But you did take a bazillion kilowatts of my Phoenix energy through you and you think I'm sexy."  
  
"Fucking shit cock fucking fuck,” I said because I am not the poet in English that I am in Russian, and I didn’t want to use my best material yet in case I needed it in a few minutes.  
  
“I know,” she murmured. “You also still hate me. I can taste that, like a scent in the back of my mouth. You never let me see you. What an elegant, epic mess you are. Will you still hate me if I fuck you?”  
  
Grey … screwed up telepathy-related dirty talk …  
  
"Да, пожалуйста. Да," I said. <Yes, please. Yes.>  
  
“Huh, you can say please," Grey whispered. “I can see what you want. You can’t hide from me.”  
  
“I don’t need to. And I don’t need to see inside your head to know I’ve got less shame than you do.”  
  
“Remember what happened last time you said you could take me.”  
  
“Grey, you talk too much.”  
  
She pushed me back and did something telekinetic so we went from sitting up together to me lying on my back, her on top of me. And then my pants shredded off my body, followed by my cute boxer briefs. But not my boots. Which was good, because shredding my boots would’ve really pissed me off.  
  
Having my clothes ripped off by a telekinetic who does not have the world's greatest control, fearing that I could lose some hair or skin or part of a limb, much much hotter than I wanted to admit.  
  
That wasn't even the best part. She said, "You cannot fucking take me," a bunch of times. I proved her wrong every one of them.  
  
And it was Limbo so: shouting, swearing, screaming. Kinds of pain that shouldn’t have worked but did. More screaming, especially the angry, hot, swearing kind.  
  
In the middle, for a moment outside of myself, seeing us from a distance: massive flaming wings, bird talons of fire, demon horns, lashing tail, hooves planted against stone, claws digging into skin that was more fire than flesh. A stranger would think we were fighting, but amid that wrestling, she was inside me with her mind and I was inside her with magic, both pushing each other past where we thought our limits were.  
  
Afterward, lying on the ground in a pile of torn and burnt clothing, I said, “Gods, Kitty’s going to kill me.”  
  
“How are you more afraid of her than me?” Grey asked.  
  
“Because I love her. All you can do is kill me and I’m not even sure you can do that. I will say this: I am going to be so sore for so fucking long.”  
  
She chuckled, sounding giddy with all the endorphins, and said, “Me too. Can you teleport us back inside the school? Preferably into a room with a closed door? I'm not sure I can stand up."  
  
"Thank the gods, I thought that was only going to be me. I wonder if I can get us into the hot tub."  
  
"Too bad you can't port the hot tub to Limbo.”  
  
"Pipes and shit," I said and she laughed. I added, “My control’s shot right now. I’m going to teleport us into the woods and see if I can make a second teleport into the school from there. Might be easier if I can see it.”  
  
I got us among trees, lying next to each other in some leaves. She pulled out her phone because somehow she still had her jacket on—and nothing else. I was having feelings about that jacket.  
  
“Right day and time,” she said. “About twenty minutes after the last time I remember anything.”  
  
I already had an arm around her shoulders, so I shifted sideways a little and kissed her very slowly and carefully. Somewhat careful because of her, but mostly for me. The endorphins were wearing off and I hurt a lot.  
  
Her body pressed along the length of mine. Her groan was more pain and sighing than desire. "Rasputin, I cannot do that again right now."  
  
"Not even a little?"  
  
"How can you?" she asked.  
  
"Oh I can't," I admitted. "I'm just teasing you. There's a good chance my left shoulder isn't quite in the socket and I'm not sure how I’d get my clothes on if you hadn’t shredded them.”  
  
She sat up, caught herself with a hand against the ground because she wasn't that steady, and stared down at me. "Are you serious?"  
  
"Uh, yeah."  
  
"You let me dislocate your shoulder?"  
  
“I think that was the Phoenix energy. Loosened it a lot at least. That last round on the boulder put it over the edge. Weird angle.”  
  
She started crying. That hit me hard in the heart/gut region. She cries a lot when she hurts people; I didn't know that then. I pulled her down with my good arm and held her as tight as I could. "It's okay," I whispered a bunch of times. "You can't break me."  
  
I kissed her temple and the side of her face up by her ear, just pressed my lips against her skin for a long time while she cried against my good shoulder. She is much too sweet a girl for all the things that've been done to her. But don’t tell her I said that.  
  
After a while she sat up again and said, "Okay, shut up, I need to concentrate."  
  
“Um, maybe you should close up your jacket some and the concentration would be easier.”  
  
“Like you don’t have the discipline to ignore that. Rasputin, I’ve been in your mind for hours now.”  
  
“Shit, what all did you get?” I asked.  
  
"Enough that I don't feel supremely bad about the shoulder. And I didn't know you were such a romantic mushball. And if we do this again … you'll find out. Now seriously, think about something boring or we're walking back into the school half naked.”  
  
I thought about paperwork and how much I hate paperwork. She levitated some clothes out of her dresser, through an open window, across the campus (hopefully unseen), through the woods to us.  
  
After we were decent enough, I teleported us to the front steps of the school. That was the best I could do with my focus as screwed as it was.  
  
And that's how I ended up limping into medical with a school sweatshirt zipped loosely around my torso, left arm tied against my body with a pair of Grey’s workout leggings, leaning heavily on Grey, who was also limping pretty hard and carrying my boots in her free hand.  
  
The doc didn't say anything. She knew as soon as we walked in. But a student getting a transfusion in one of the beds started and stared and finally said, "Wow, you really beat the shit out of each other. Who won?"  
  
Grey said, "We both did."  
  
I was leaning back on the bed, eyes closed because the pain was now very much beyond a pleasant level. I managed to grumble, "Told you so."  
  
"Asshole," she said.  
  
I laughed. "Twat."  
  
To this day, the kids think we still hate each other. And that what goes on between us in the danger room is all fighting. That's exactly how we want it.


	5. Who's Going to Tell Kitty?

  
If I told Kitty I’d had sex with Grey, here’s how I think it would’ve gone:  
  
“Um, I had sex with Grey.” Yes, I’d start that way because not being upfront and clear about it would’ve just made it worse.  
  
“Which Grey?”  
  
“Do we have more than one?”  
  
“You can’t mean Rachel. You half-hate her.”  
  
“Uh, yeah, maybe quarter-hate now.”  
  
“You didn’t! Illyana Nikolaevna Rasputin, you did NOT.” <— I can tell she’s super mad when she genders my middle name female because she only uses Nikolai when she’s flirting.  
  
“It was an emergency. The world could’ve ended.” I’d tried a bunch of possible responses and they all sounded equally terrible.  
  
“Don’t you dare! Don’t even! You can’t … we have rules! How can I trust you if you don’t even respect the rules? Do you remember what a jerk you were when you found out Rachel and I had dated? For months! You were the world’s biggest jerk. You were terrible to be around. And you think just because you say ‘Phoenix’ I’m going to give you a pass? You’re going to tell me it was some world-ending Phoenix crisis that you came out of naked and fell into Rachel’s private parts?”  
  
…  
  
So that was as far as I’d gotten in trying to figure out how to tell her, which was why, the day before Kitty was due home, I found myself pacing in Grey’s office. Grey got back from class, leaned in her doorway with her arms folded across her chest, and said, “I’ll tell her.”  
  
I stopped in the middle of the room, boots planted in a wide, solid stance. Anyone walking by would’ve thought we were in the middle of a fight.  
  
“That’s not what I’m asking,” I told Grey. “I just need advice about what to tell her. And how. And what words to use.”  
  
“Take a two-day mission somewhere and let me tell her,” Grey insisted. She moved around me—way around me—to her desk.  
  
“I’m a teleporter, there are no two-day missions,” I pointed out.  
  
“Get one from Strange. Those always take you a while. Look, if you stay, what were going to start with, ‘I had sex with Grey?’”  
  
“Um, yeah.”  
  
“That’s stupid. Here’s how it goes. I tell her that things went sideways and I almost Phoenixed half of New York off the map, you took me to Limbo and siphoned off the energy using some funky-ass sex magic because that’s all you know how to do, and then we had sex to make sure everything was okay with you. Then she yells at me, realizes it all makes sense, hates me for a while and isn’t quite so mad at you.”  
  
“That’s not all I know how to do,” I protested. “And I should be the one to talk to her.”  
  
“You’ll fuck it up. You saved me from killing a lot of people, let me save your marriage, or at least this part of it.”  
  
“What if I’m back to hating you again?”  
  
“What if I don’t care?” she asked with the perfect amount of actual not-caring. “Also, I can read Kitty’s mind. You know I’m the right person to tell her. Go get lost. I’ll text you when it’s safe.”  
  
I wanted to argue. I wanted to yell at her, but mostly I wanted to yell at myself. “Grey?”  
  
She looked up, eyes narrow, braced in her chair.  
  
“Thank you,” I said.  
  
I left fast because I really didn’t need her looking at me with wonder, considering what we’d done in Limbo a few days ago.  
  
Strange sent me to find an ancient amulet that turned out to have disguised itself as the car fob of a London cabbie. I thought I’d found it a little too fast and was going to have to invite myself to dinner at the Strange household and then maybe sleep in Limbo—but Grey texted me.  
  
_Kitty is 3/4 mad, 1/2 worried, 1/2 missing you, 1/3 wondering who was on top but won’t ask. Still loves both of us (you more). We’re both still in trouble (me more). Bring flowers and chocolates and something dirty (but don’t show her that last until she asks)._  
  
Which goes to show that Grey is a champion but also that she doesn’t know Kitty that well, because if I showed up with any gifts, Kitty would literally throw them back in my face. She hates apology gifts.  
  
Luckily the “something dirty” doesn’t count as a gift if I’m wearing it.  



	6. Where Else Would I Keep a Sex Dungeon?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (This presumes Rachel Grey has tattoos down her body in addition to her face. Not canonical.)

The second time with Grey, it was spring break, most of the students were gone; the ones who'd stayed were in the kid wing with people other than me looking after them. I was in the kitchen making myself dinner, jamming K-pop on my headphones, drinking a little something I'd fermented in Limbo and feeling quite nice as a result. I turned around to check on the oven and Grey was standing in the doorway staring at me.  
  
I pulled out an earbud and stared back at her.  
  
"You can dance," she said.  
  
"Of course. Not like Kitty, but I do okay. Why does this surprise you?" I opened the oven and checked on my roast and potatoes while waiting for her answer.  
  
“You made it so I can't read your mind again,” she said.  
  
"I got a more fire-proof spell too. I thought it would be smart and maybe polite."  
  
"It's not," she said. "It's … enticing. You're so quiet."  
  
In addition to being beautiful, Grey is a person I don't quite trust to be in control of herself, can't fully relax around her, and that is very hot. All of which flashed into my mind as I pulled the pan out of the over and set it on top.  
  
“You know Kitty and I didn’t talk about what the new rule is pertaining to her exes. Did she tell you?” I asked.

We'd talked about a million other things pertaining to our relationship, but I'd been afraid to ask about Grey specifically. Like I'd seem to eager to have sex with her again when I was still working out how I felt about all of it. I'd mostly been grateful Kitty didn't tell me to go sleep in Limbo for a week or two. And then when we'd come almost to the end of talking it all through, Kitty got super possessive, which was so cute I forgot any remaining questions I had.  
  
Grey moved out of the doorway to lean against the counter next to me. “Kitty said I can fuck you.”  
  
“No, there’s no way she said that.”  
  
Grey sighed, worked her teeth and tongue, like she had to push the words to the front of her mouth before she could say them. “True. Her words were, ‘ _Well, at least you’re not Spiral_.’” Grey’s jaw tightened. “And then she said, ‘ _Don’t hurt her_.’”  
  
That sounded like Kitty. The words at least. The pain in Grey’s voice was all hers. The fear that people didn’t talk about her like that.    
  
“She’s already said the same to me about you,” I told her.  
  
“You’re lying and you think I won’t know because I can’t read your mind.”  
  
“You’re bluffing, you can’t read me for shit, and I’m not lying.” I lifted the unlabelled bottle of sparkling liquid with my oven-mitted hand and a clean glass with the other and poured her a good shot of it. Held it out, saying, "I have no idea what this will do to you."  
  
"You say the sweetest things, Snowflake," she said and tossed it back. She said my old nickname just right: a thin layer of mockery over a deep well of pain.  
  
I grinned. "You're lucky I don't know what they used to call you."  
  
"You know enough," she said. "And you never say it. How many years have we known each other? You never use it against me. You're sweet … what the blazes was in that drink?"  
  
"It's a magically distilled potato vodka that I aged in Limbo."  
  
"My eyeballs feel inside out."  
  
"What I'm hearing is that you'd like another one.”  
  
She held out her glass and I poured. “What did you call me when we fought? Twat? How do you say that in Russian?”  
  
“ _Pizda_. Works for twat or cunt. Wouldn’t call you that, though, it has an unfortunate association with the word ‘liar.’”  
  
“What should I call you?” she asked.  
  
I considered her. She was leaning back against the counter, sipping the vodka, watching me over the rim of her glass.  
  
“What would you call me in Russian? Probably _mudila_ , ‘asshole’ or, if you drink a bit more of that, _durochka_.”  
  
“That’s pretty, what’s that?”  
  
“Little idiot,” I told her.  
  
She put her head back, laughing. “Wonderful.”  
  
She sipped the vodka. I tried not to roll my eyes at her for sipping vodka and got the roast out of the oven. Didn’t particularly feel like eating it yet. In fact, I was having an idea. I put foil over the roast and slid it into the fridge, even though it should’ve sat out for a while to cool. Not sure how long we’d be gone for.  
  
“Can I teleport you?” I asked.  
  
“You’re asking?”  
  
She hadn’t said, “no,” so I teleported us to Limbo. I was getting better about asking first, but I wasn’t great yet about waiting for an actual “yes.” I took us to a very specific spot in Limbo: big room carved in a mountainside with thick stone walls and only one set of windows looking out over a valley.  
  
Grey turned around, registering the contents of the room. “You have a sex dungeon in Limbo?”  
  
“Where else would I keep it?”  
  
“I mean, why do you … oh, was this for Spiral?”  
  
“No, that one I destroyed. S’ym built me this one after. Trying to cheer me up.” At the look on her face, I added, “It’s worse if he tries to bake me a cake.”  
  
“You destroyed the other one?”  
  
“Yeah, if you look out across the valley there, see that patch of melted rock. Used to be there.”  
  
“You burned it to the bedrock? You were that upset? Over Spiral?” as she asked, her questions got more incredulous. “Why?”  
  
“I loved her. Thought maybe that would be it for me. Little family even. When we were kids, Kitty was everything, but then coming back, being adults, I didn’t think we’d work again. And when she’s not being fucked up, Spiral’s pretty amazing.”  
  
That was more than I’d meant to say, and more than I’d said in a while to anybody other than Kitty or S’ym. They were the only two who’d seen me crying and wrecked about that breakup. Kind of a relief to know I could talk about it now with getting all teary, but still I felt heavy in my chest, thick, not wanting to say much more.  
  
“That’s a statement,” Grey said. “What happened?”  
  
“She lied to me a lot. About not using, not being high when she was essentially the whole time.” That wasn’t all of it, wasn’t even half, but I didn’t want to say the rest.  
  
“Shit. So then you burned down that place and your demon underling built you a new one? And you think it’s a good idea to bring me here?”  
  
“He prefers being called my lieutenant,” I said. “And I didn’t bring you here for all that fancy stuff, this is just the only place I have a bed with restraints.”  
  
“Because phasing,” she said. “So no point in having them back at the school?”  
  
“Yeah, and I hate being tied down. How are you about it?”  
  
“No collar.”  
  
“I promise. Wrists and ankles, maybe some cross-body ropes if you like,” I said, my hands sketching lines in the air so she could see what I meant.  
  
She was still looking around the room, but paused long enough to flash me a grin. “This sounds like a terrible idea. Let’s try it.”  
  
“Great. What’s your safeword?”  
  
“I don’t have one,” she admitted. “I don’t usually hang with people where I’d need one.”  
  
“That explains the general stick-up-your-ass demeanor. How about … Prestige?”  
  
“You are such a total shit-head.”  
  
I moved across the room to her, cupped her face in my hands, said, “You love it,” and kissed her. She didn’t argue. Kind of melted in my arms, really, which cemented my plans for her.  
  
Also made me want to teleport out of my clothes. Problem is I can’t make a stepping disc the size of my body that doesn’t include my clothes. One of these years I’m going to figure that out.  
  
Grey didn’t protest as I undressed her, kissing as I went. She stroked my hair and shoulders, but mostly stared around the room, still getting used to it.  
  
I drew her to the bed, watching her body move. Pushed her down onto the covers, crawled on top of her. I moved her arms up and to the sides, fitted a restraint around each wrist, kissed her cheeks and her eyelids.  
  
“I want to tie you down and fuck you until you cry,” I told her.  
  
“I’m not going to. But you can try.”  
  
“Does it take effort for you to keep your tattoos hidden? If so, you can drop the illusion.”  
  
She did. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from reacting. There’s an edge between fierce and furious, and I had to stay on the fierce side to be any good in bed. Otherwise I’d have to go destroy things until I could trust myself again.  
  
I made it to her ankles and fastened cuffs around those. Then I got out my rope, the red color because it would go with her hair. Took a few minutes to weave fire-resist magic into it.  
  
Grey was already breathing faster. I wove the rope around her body in a pattern that covered most of her tattoos, highlighted others and emphasized her breasts.  
  
I went to the chest of drawers and opened a few until I found one very well-stocked with a half-dozen kinds of lube. “S’ym, you’re one hell of a lieutenant,” I murmured and picked up bottles until I found the one I wanted.  
  
Grey didn’t complain when I put my mouth on her or my tongue inside her. She rocked her hips toward me and growled. I got three fingers inside her easily. Used the lube and worked in a fourth. Then she started to get alarmed. About the time she felt the thickness of my hand pushing against her opening, insistent.  
  
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, voice rising.  
  
“Told you,” I said. “Relax.”  
  
“Kind of hard to relax when you’re … oh fuck!”  
  
I found the right amount of pressure, only enough to keep her hitting the edge of alarm and then sinking back into confused pleasure. She was swearing at me, but soft stuff, like “shit” and “fuck.”  
  
I said, “You can always use ‘safeword’ as your safeword if you forget what it is, Prestige.”  
  
“Oh fuck you, you insufferable ass,” she said and went from there into filthy enough swearing that it made me proud. “Cuntface” was the high point, because of its accuracy.  
  
I had my rhythm and settled in, half my hand moving inside her, pushing her to open more for me. My other hand rested over her pubic mound, fingers brushing her clit every so often or pressing down so it would get rubbed by my fucking hand.  
  
I went easy until she stopped yelling and swearing at me. Then I checked her eyes; there was only a tiny ring of green iris around wide pupils dark with wonder. That’s when I got serious. I pulled out long enough to unclip her ankles so she could position her legs however she needed. From there, back to working my hand deep inside her, down to where my thumb stopped progress. Then back a little to tuck my thumb with my other fingers.  
  
She got tight again at the base of my thumb. Anyone would. I don’t have small hands. But she was working with me, mouth wide, gulping breath, eyes unfocused.  
  
And it was a sure bet she didn’t have a thought in her mind. Not any of her own, not anyone else’s. Pure silence in there, filled with the immense sensations from her body.  
  
“Open for me,” I whispered. “Just a little more. Let me in. Open up.”  
  
She tipped her hips back, opened her legs a fraction wider and let me in. My whole hand inside her.  
  
I thought I was ready for this. That it wouldn’t make me feel like crying and praying, falling on my face and weeping. But have my whole hand inside someone always did. Like walking into a hundred cathedrals at once. Maybe like walking into Heaven. I put my free hand on the bed, leaned on my arm, let my face hang down, breathed.  
  
I curled my fingers around my thumb and moved inside her, slow, deep. No part of her fought me. Sacred … sacred to the degree that I expected the room around us to transform, and in some sense, it did. I’d never see it the same again.  
  
When I looked up, she was crying but didn’t seemed to notice. Tears ran down from the corner of her unfocused eyes. First tears of water but then fire, dripping down the sides of her face, searing the bed, igniting the blankets.  
  
Flames spread from her skin, consuming the blankets, the mattress, igniting the bed frame. Still her wide eyes stayed open, looking up without seeing. And I stayed inside her, moving faster, meeting the hungry rhythm of her body.  
  
The bed frame broke apart around us, consumed by fire. I wove magic to cushion us, bring us to floor slowly. The restraints held and there was enough give in the chains not to pull on her arms. They’d been anchored in the rock and made to resist about anything. And the ropes stayed wrapped around her blazing body, soft lines through the fire.  
  
She wept and burned and I went on fucking her, slow and steady, making her feel her body, letting her fire wash over me. I’d forgotten to fire-proof my clothes, so those were gone, but at least I still had hair and eyebrows.  
  
Sounds came from her, a rising cry, and the fire burned higher, hotter. Her muscles caressed my hand and closed in, painful, frightening, perfect, holy.  
  
We went beyond enough, to the brink of too much. If I was fated to die during sex, it was damn well going to be with Kitty. My free hand wrapped around the ropes over her belly and tugged.  
  
“Bring it in, Grey, you’re burning the rock.”  
  
She growled, so low and heavy it vibrated up my arm into my body. If this whole beautiful fuck hadn’t been me coming through my skin, it was now. Face down, mouth open, so gone to everything but her wrapped around me and my soul shining out through my skin.  
  
Another growl from her, ending higher pitched, a whine of pain. I gathered back into myself and relaxed my hand, worked it gently out of her while her muscles helped push me out.  
  
I went up her body, unclipping the wrist restraints, curling her into my arms. Sat against the wall and let her sob and shake. Tears on my face too and I didn’t bother trying to brush them away. No way we were telling anyone about this.  
  
Except Kitty, if she asked. Of course.  
  
The place where the bed had been, the floor was fused, dark gray, soft and sleek, like glass. I loved it.  
  
“Look at how beautiful that is,” I whispered to Rachel.  
  
She brought her head off my chest enough to see the room. “I destroyed your bed. Why did you let me burn it?”  
  
“You made this place better. You’re so careful with everyone. You don’t have to be careful with me. Rach, gods, that was perfect.”  
  
She slumped into me, shivering.  
  
“You want me to teleport us back to your room?” I asked.  
  
“No, it’s quiet here. Can we stay in the quiet?”  
  
“There’s a blanket across the room on that chest.”  
  
She telekinesed it to where I could grab it. I spread it over us, moving down along the wall as I did, so we were spooned together with my back to the wall. I had one arm under Rachel’s head and wrapped the other around her waist, holding her against me.  
  
We dozed together for a while, not fully asleep but no reason to be awake enough to think. Both still feeling every sensation we’d been through together.  
  
Eventually she said, “You can’t be comfortable.”  
  
“I used to sleep like this all the time.”  
  
She rolled over, pressed her face into the curve of my shoulder. “Why does your fucked up stuff work?”  
  
“You want things to be too perfect. I appreciate a beautiful mess.”  
  
“Are you talking about me?”  
  
“Hm, well, wait until you try to walk.”  
  
As evidence to the effectiveness of all this, she didn’t even protest or swear at me.  
  
“I’ll get you back to your room in a bit,” I told her. “When people see you limping around the next few days, tell them you helped me with some demons.”  
  
“That’s more believable,” she said, laughing a little. “What are you going to tell Kitty?”  
  
I lifted my hand off her and made a fist with my thumb tucked in; not the kind of fist you’d ever hit a person with. Rachel felt me move, turned her head until she saw it.  
  
“Oh. Will she be mad?”  
  
“I’m hoping for inspired.”


	7. Coming Home Early

Grey and I were off and on and what-the-fuck-ever after that. I started noticing that when Kitty was off-world, she'd come home sooner than expected, unannounced. And I wondered if she was getting jealous. But I didn't know how to ask her.   
  
Sometimes the people/social thing falls through for me. I can't process. Even thinking about how to think about it hurts. I just want to get away from the ones who are close to me, the ones where it’s a lot of give-and-take and complicated figuring out.  
  
The next time Kitty was off-world, I decided I'd sneak away to a sex club and wipe everything out of my head that way. Maybe allay Kitty's fears by hooking up with someone new. I usually didn’t like sex with strangers, but that didn’t mean never. And if it made things better for Kitty … probably the wrong reason to fuck a stranger, but not the worst reason.  
  
Despite the telepath-blocking spell, Grey was waiting by the door to the garage, arms folded across her chest. She must've read in someone else's brain that I'd scheduled to take a car. And I was fucking glad to see her, because I really was not in a mood for strangers, and because she looked already mad and already-mad Grey is one of my favorites. Not that I'd let that show.   
  
"Where are you going?" she asked.  
  
"Out. You bored?"  
  
"Profoundly."   
  
There were students walking by on the grass so I thought loudly in Grey's direction: _Kitty's been gone for days … I'm going to a sex club. If you want to come with me, you're not wearing that._   
  
_No, five minutes._   
  
I regretted that. She returned in an outfit so much better than mine: leather and mesh and low cut with her breasts pushed up in a way that was impossibly elegant rather than trashy. I was in a bad enough mood that I'd thrown on jeans and a t-shirt. Massive fucking boots, at least, but they could not compete.   
  
"Shit, Grey, now I have to change," I told her.  
  
"Don't you dare. Have you seen your ass in those jeans?"   
  
I cocked my head to the side and looked her up and down again. "Are you saying that we're going to this club to fuck each other?"  
  
"Why else? You think I'm going to bump uglies with some normal whose mind is an open book of disgusting pedantry? You were going to ditch me when we got there?"  
  
"I had no plan, like usual," I told her as we walked into the garage. It was half-empty of cars, devoid of other people. I found our ride.   
  
"Sometimes you're an idiot, Rasputin."  
  
"Yeah, but only when boobs are involved. Get in the car before one of us ends up getting fucked across it."   
  
"Promises," she said and slammed into the passenger side.   
  
It was a queer club, of course. More men than women, but I like that. Men are hot as long as they don't touch me. Gay men are extra hot because they don't give a shit about me and I can watch all day without worrying that I’ll be asked to join in.   
  
Grey and I wandered around, watched part of a scene, got bored at about the same time, cruised part of the room, ended up watching the end of a much more interesting scene.   
  
"You going to let me tie you up this time?” she asked, pointing across the room at a low table with a variety of straps and buckles.   
  
"That sounds like a terrible idea."   
  
"You remember your safeword?" she asked.   
  
"I remember yours."   
  
She grabbed my hand and pulled me across the room while I was still trying to figure out if I’d let her do this. I mean, worst case, I could teleport myself and the table to Limbo and magic off the restraints and then break some shit until I felt okay.  
  
In the middle of the room, she froze. Completely froze. Not a curious pause or a hesitation, but a full stop. Her fingers in mine went ice cold.   
  
I moved sideways to peer around her. A person on all fours wearing a muzzle was heeling on a leash next to her human master. A human hound. Not the kind Grey had been, but close enough. Grey's face had gone pale and blank as winter.   
  
"Grey," I said, but she didn't move. "Professor Rachel Grey. Rach. Come on, look at me."   
  
She turned, but her eyes were vacant. Seriously gone. The kind of gone that precedes a telepathic freakout that can level a building full of people.   
  
I put my fingertips on her cheek and kissed her. Softly. Just super gentle, lips on lips. Like kissing a statue. But I figured whatever world she'd been jerked into, whatever hell of memory, it wasn't a place where anyone kissed her, so maybe it would bring her a little more present.  
  
I kissed her cheeks, curled my hands very lightly around her shoulders. She smelled like clean fire, not dirty sulfur.   
  
"Can you come outside with me?" I asked.   
  
She nodded so I held out my hand. It took so long for her to focus on my fingers, for her hand to lift, hang in the air, reach out for me. I pulled gently and she followed, stumbling a little.   
  
The club was crowded but I used my "get the fuck out of the way" look and a path cleared to the door. I pushed through into the cool evening, still pulling her behind me. There was a line to get in and a line of cabs waiting for fares. I walked her to the side of the building near the parking lot.   
  
I could teleport but that would probably freak her out worse.   
  
"I want to take you home," I said.   
  
Her face turned toward my voice. Still no one there behind her eyes. Sounded like she was speaking from a hundred miles away as she asked, "You kissed me?"  
  
Okay so she'd felt that. Seemed like a good sign. "I'm going to kiss you again, and then I'm going to take you home, unless you say no. You can say no."  
  
She stood there like she was carved from stone. I put my lips on hers and this time she leaned in a fraction, a brush more pressure on my lips. She made a quiet sound, not of desire, just agreement.   
  
"Let's go home," I suggested and she nodded.   
  
It was an extremely silent ride back. We came in from the garage and she stood in the hall like she didn't know where she was.   
  
"Rach, do you want to go to your room or the TV room?" I asked.   
  
"I saw a Hound," she said, faintly, far away.   
  
I bit the inside of my cheek hard because her voice made me want to fall apart. Deep breath in, blink back the tears in my eyes.   
  
"Are you sure about that?" I asked. "What did you really see?"  
  
"They had her muzzled on a leash. They were going to make her hunt again, again."  
  
"Where were we?" I asked.   
  
"The future?"  
  
I stepped around in front of her. The tattoos were all over her face and I traced them with my fingers, super light, as if I could erase them.   
  
"Present time," I told her. "We went out, do you remember? You wanted to come to the club with me. We were going to, you know, these jeans, my ass."  
  
She didn't smile. Her face hadn't moved from vacant. How many times did Kitty have to deal with me like this? Hundreds. And she didn't even understand what it was like from the inside. Kitty was a saint.   
  
Touch seemed okay for Grey. I ran my palms down the outside of her arms and took her hands in mine, rubbed at her freezing skin.   
  
"What did you really see?" I asked again.   
  
Her eyes weren't focusing anywhere, but her fingers closed around mine, holding on. "I saw a Hound," she said. "I saw … a person. A person in a muzzle. I saw, in her mind she was happy, or did she only think she was?"  
  
"I suspect she was happy," I said. "The other person with her was pretty hot. And I think she wanted to be there playing like that. Because she was playing, Rach. She was free."   
  
"Free," Grey breathed the word, tears gathering in her eyes.   
  
"You're free, too. You're safe. Home, Rach, you’re home. Come sit on the couch with me?"  
  
"Are you going to kiss me again?"   
  
"Do you want me to?"  
  
Her gaze found my face for a second. She shook her head. "I can't tonight."   
  
"I know. I had something else in mind anyway."  
  
"You don't plan," she mumbled as I drew her down the hall to the TV room.   
  
I chuckled, tried to keep the bitter edge hidden. Oh I had plans. They just weren't plans about sex. I had plans for what to do if I lost control, if Grey lost control, if any one at this school lost control. I knew dozens of ways to get people out of shock, back from dissociation, out of traumatic memory. I was the one Kurt texted when a student seemed beyond reach. Before he even called for Grey or another telepath.   
  
I put Grey on the couch, got her boots and jacket off, blanket around her, TV on with the volume low. Got us both bowls of ice cream with a side of cookies. I fed her the first few spoonfuls until she took the spoon out of my hand.   
  
And that is how Kitty, coming home early from space, in the middle of the night, found me and Grey sitting on the couch, watching _Grey's Anatomy_ , the annoying episodes she liked, while I rubbed her feet.   
  
Kitty did a triple or quadruple take because we were at opposite ends of the couch, legs entwined, blanket over most of us, but Grey's feet in my lap.   
  
"When you said 'poly' this was not what I'd pictured," Kitty said. "After all those conversations, you end up cuddling? I don't even know what to feel about this."   
  
She looked tired and frazzled and way more upset than I thought she'd be to see another woman's feet in my lap.  
  
"Hey," Grey said sleepily. "We went out clubbing." She pushed off the couch and stood weaving on her feet.   
  
"Can you sleep okay?" I asked and she nodded. "I'll walk you up.” And to Kitty, “ _Koshka_ , I'll meet you in our room in a few."  
  
Kitty gave me a very confused, half-angry, half-curious stare. "You're tucking Grey into bed?"  
  
"I'll explain," I told her.   
  
It took longer than expected. I turned on the telepathic sound-machine thing Grey uses to calm her mind and sat with her until she was asleep. Then I snuck out and down the hall to my suite.   
  
Kitty was in bed reading, looking distinctly unhappy. Still cute, just super cute and beautiful with her hair a mess and her lips in a pout-scowl. I wanted to kiss her, but that didn't seem to be on the table at the moment.   
  
"What on earth is that?" she hissed as I was closing the door. "Half the time you don't even like her. But you fight with me so you can have sex with her and then you cuddle?"  
  
"She pisses me off. Like everyone. Except you. Katya, she saw a woman dressed like a dog, on hands and knees, on a leash. Thought she saw a Hound."  
  
"Oh hell."  
  
"Yeah. She's barely back from it. We should both keep an eye on her the next few days," I suggested.  
  
"You took her to that kind of club?" Kitty's voice was still in the unhappy-to-mad range.  
  
"Usually it's not that hardcore," I told her.

She didn't respond to that, so I went into the bathroom and washed up for bed, put on a clean shirt, crawled between the sheets next to Kitty.   
  
"What were you going to do if that hadn't happened?" Kitty asked.  
  
"Um, we hadn't quite worked out whose turn it was to be on the bottom."  
  
"How do you work that out?"   
  
"Sometimes we go to the danger room and fight until it's obvious."  
  
She folded her glasses on the bedside table and turned off the light.   
  
"Are you sorry you asked? I don't have to tell you," I said. "I don't have to …" I was going to say that I didn't have to keep having sex with Grey, but that didn't seem fair.   
  
"No," she said. She settled down on her pillow, but on her back, which is her thinking position.   
  
"Why _are_ you home early?" I asked.  
  
"No reason, thing went more smoothly than expected," she said in the tone that meant there very much _was_ a reason.   
  
"You don't want me to stop," I said. "But it feels like you were trying to …" I was going to say 'catch me' but that wasn't right.   
  
Another idea was surfacing in my mind, so startling it took me a minute to turn over and consider. I didn't want to ask and be wrong, but once I had the idea, I could not let it go. I breathed out the words, very quietly, "Did you want to watch?"   
  
And held my breath because if she said yes … oh I wanted her to say yes, more than I'd ever have expected.   
  
And if she said no, I was going to have to find a place to hide until the embarrassment of asking had faded. Maybe under the bed, if I could fit there.  
  
She was so still I knew she couldn't have fallen asleep. After a long silence, she whispered, "Yes."   
  
Electricity, lightning, magic through me. I almost sat up, but that would be too sudden for this moment. I wanted to get up and go back to the club and find anyone, find the right, the perfect, someone for Kitty to … oh yes.   
  
It was a really long time before I could cohere my thinking well enough to talk. "Okay," I said softly in the heavy darkness. "We'll do that."   
  
"If you want," she said.  
  
"Yes, yes." I couldn't say how much I wanted that. I grabbed her hand and put it on the front of my boxers -- and she was on top of me, phasing her fingers through the material, home.


	8. Stronger together

I waited long enough for Kitty to think I'd forgotten. As if I could forget how her voice sounded after I'd asked "Did you want to watch?" — small and soft and awed. Waited for her to have to take another off-planet trip, just for a few days.  
  
How to set it up just right? When it came down to it, there was one obvious choice.  
  
From the downstairs living room, I texted Grey: _I'm watching your favorite show. Lexie's about to die. Come down._  
  
Her voice, next to my ear: _You're an ass._  
  
Texted back: _You like my ass. Srsly, what are you doing?_  
  
She projected a sigh, said: _Nothing. But I know what you're going to ask. Not sure I want to be used like that. I may not be able to read your mind, but I can read Kitty'_ s.    
  
I tossed my phone across the couch and stared at the TV for a long time without watching it. Used was not okay. I'd have to come up with another plan.  
  
Grey came in and curled up on the far side of the couch. She was in gray yoga pants and a tank top with a pajama top over it, stripes and all. She found my phone, between the cushion and her thigh, and set it on the side table.  
  
"Are you mad?" she asked. "You have a look."  
  
"If you're going to feel used, I can't … I would never."  
  
"Why me?" She had one leg tucked up against her chest, defensive, arm around it.  
  
"You know why," I said and then it dawned on me that she probably didn't. "I feel things for you. And Kitty always has, of course, different from when we were all kids, but still. Look, just give me your hand and I'll let you read my mind and you'll see."  
  
She shook her head at me. "I don't want to. I know too much of everyone's business already. I like not reading you. You have to tell me how you feel.”  
  
Closing my eyes, I rubbed at the lids with my fingers. It was not late enough for the wave of tiredness I felt.  
  
I said, “It's good that you exist. Even when you piss me off, it’s better that you’re around. And when I don't see you for a long time … there's an ache."  
  
"You Russians are poets."  
  
"You fucking asked," I told her. "Don't mock my answer."  
  
"I'm not mocking," she said. And more quietly, added, "That was kind of beautiful and it makes me want to run."  
  
"You want to go back to how it is when we just fuck sometimes?" I asked.  
  
"Tell me about this thing with Kitty, what she wants," Grey asked.  
  
"You already read it in her mind," I growled back at her. "You just said so."  
  
"Use your words or I'm going back upstairs."  
  
"Fine. Last time, after the aborted club trip and all that, I thought maybe … I asked if she'd come back early hoping to walk in on me, on us. I asked if she wanted to watch. And she said 'yes' in this small voice that was so full of everything. I couldn't sleep. I want that for her. I want it for me, for us, for you … if … I don't know."  
  
"Yeah you do," she said.  
  
I didn't know how to explain the rightness of it. How much more everything could be. The way that my feelings for Kitty reverberated off my feelings for her. Since we’d started having sex, I’d been startled by how easy it all was. I’d worried that time with Grey would distract from my time with Kitty or that all the heat with Grey would take away from Kitty, but instead it spilled over. Or, perhaps that was just me, opened up and hot and available to Kitty the way I wanted to be—because being more open in one way made me more open in many others.    
  
"Grey, there's nothing I would rather do than this … than you and me, like we are, set up so Kitty can watch, all of that. Not only for her. Understand?"  
  
She was watching the figures moving on the TV screen I'd muted. "You want your cake and eat it too?" she asked. "The woman you fuck and the woman you love--"  
  
I put up a hand and cut her off, spat out the words, "You fucking dick, you know I love you."  
  
"That’s how you tell me?"  
  
I surged across the couch, leaned over her, pinning her back against the arm. Pressing my face to the side of her elegant neck, I growled, "I fucking love you, Rach. I love you. Don't make me cry."  
  
"Asshole," she said, her voice catching.  
  
Her arms wrapped around me tight and we lay like that, half slumped uncomfortably across the couch and its arm. And she was crying. My fingers found the side of her face, traced the invisible lines of her tattoos. I followed with my lips, soft over her face, rubbing her tears away with my cheeks.  
  
"Am I supposed to say it back?" she asked.  
  
"Don't have to. I know you do."  
  
"You are an arrogant shit, Rasputin. And I still come in second to Kitty, I know."  
  
"Most days, I come in second to Kitty," I said. “Without Kitty, I just can’t …”  
  
Grey shifted away from the arm of the couch, me moving backward with her, until we were sitting against the cushions, her arm still around me but more carelessly, back to not admitting everything. Or maybe back to safety, for both of us.  
  
Grey said, softly, "I am envious, you know. The way you look at Kitty. You watch her like you'd stop the world if you could. I worry that someday you'll figure out how."  
  
“I already know how,” I told her. “I just don’t like the consequences.”  
  
With Kitty it was all the little things, over years. It was the way I could see her sitting at her desk and she'd tuck her hair back the same way she had three decades before, different and same. The way she'd do a half pirouette in the kitchen after a good day if she thought no one was looking. She had this careless grace honed by decades of dancing. I'd seen her slip on a newly-mopped floor and catch herself -- like a cat, but not, because the cat would have looked embarrassed and Kitty looked surprised and pleased with herself, smug. Like her body could always have something new and surprising for her. It was the way she could juggle dozens of meetings, committees, people, boards, requests, and still lose her phone every ten minutes.  
  
I didn't have that history with Grey, but that didn’t mean she got as little attention from me as she seemed to think. "I watch you too," I admitted. "I'm just really careful that you never catch me."  
  
“You're lying. But it’s sweet.”  
  
"You levitated the garden hose off the walking path last week, to get it out of the way of everyone. But you liked the way the water droplets looked in the late afternoon sun, so you spun it a few times and held all the droplets in the air like a huge golden-diamond necklace before coiling it. I watched you from the window."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Yeah, but I don't usually know how to say that to you because …"  
  
"You and Kitty, and anyway, I do have other people,” she said.  
  
"Who?”  
  
"You really want to know?" she asked.  
  
"No. You shouldn’t tell me. I’m not good with that kind of information. I just need to know that you’re good, that I'm not using you."  
  
"You're not, sweetness.”  
  
"I like it better when you say 'asshole'."  
  
“Asshole,” she said.  
  
“Even if I didn’t have Kitty, who I do and am never giving up … You and me, we don’t stabilize each other. On our own, we'd implode or explode and take people down with us.”  
  
"Assuming I could stand to be around you that much anyway," she said. "I live in the same building, I know you leave your socks everywhere. You leave everything everywhere. I don't know how I haven't found your soulsword in the refrigerator. And I can't imagine what your bathroom looks like. You know, half the time you piss me off and still every time I see you …"  
  
"Yeah," I said. "Same. The other day I was walking by whatever class that is you do on Wednesdays and just the sound of you lecturing, I wanted to stomp in there and yell at you and take my pants off at the same time."  
  
“I could deliver that lecture now,” she said.  
  
I unbuttoned my jeans, paused. “So … about Kitty, was that a no?”  
  
“What if sometimes I’m still in love with her too?” Grey asked.  
  
“Then next time I die, you’re my backup plan until I’m alive again. Or are you saying you don’t want to, because feelings?”  
  
“I want to. But I won’t if it’s a one-time thing.”  
  
“I think that’s up to Kitty.”  
  
“If it were up to you?” she asked, sliding her hand under my shirt and up my belly.  
  
Sometimes I had moments of vertigo about Grey and Kitty, worse when I’d been watching a lot of human TV because all the relationships were couples. Other worlds, other dimensions and times had so much variety that I could easily see how biased this one time in human history was.  
  
But I’d grown up half in this world, watching those shows since I was fourteen. The vast majority of my relationship models contained two people. If there had been adults around me when I was a teen who had multiple relationships, they didn’t clue me in.  
  
So I didn’t have a working model for how to have a relationship with two people who were also in relationship with each other. And I really needed one right about now.  
  
I had no reason to be loyal to the “couple” model. In Limbo, the worst relationships I’d seen, or been in, involved only two people at a time. Creatures like Belasco could own more than one person at a time, but could only feed off one at a time. And he did feed himself on my power. If he wanted to feed himself with more enslaved people than just me, he had to keep us separate or we’d find a way to fight him. Harder to fight him alone and isolated.  
  
I saw that sometimes in this world too: one person keeping another bound to them with violence and threats, forced to serve them. Why didn’t more people have relationships with three or more? It seemed safer to me. More work, maybe, but more benefit.  
  
I caught Grey’s hand and laced my fingers with hers. We were stronger together, me and Kitty and Grey, even if I didn’t know how it should look or what to do.  
  
“I want us to figure it out,” I said. “But I don’t know how to do three people.”  
  
She grinned. “I think you only have to know how to do two.”  
  
“Do you think I can begin to extrapolate from doing one person twice?”  
  
“Let’s find out.”


	9. That's not even close to your safeword

Kitty got back a day early, which she’d planned, only to be ambushed by Hank waving his arms and insisting she attend an emergency meeting. She phased into her suite and changed into something slightly more meeting appropriate (but not completely because she was mad about this meeting). Thought about texting Illyana, but that didn’t seem fair since she wasn’t going to be available for the next two to three hours and—just in case Ilya and Grey were up to something, since she was a day early—she didn’t want to ruin the surprise.  
  
She made herself sit through enough of the meeting, and then went looking for Illyana, who wasn’t in the main building or their suite or the danger rooms, which meant she’d be in her sanctum. The sanctum was two rooms: a smallish front room with a couch and two chairs, and the much larger room where Magik did her magic, if she wasn’t doing it in Limbo. Kitty phased into the front room because it was never a good idea to go right into the magic room.  
  
The room was empty except for a brown leather jacket—not Ilya’s. Rachel Grey’s?  
  
Grey’s giggle came from the inner room, and in the same breath she said, “You asshole. I did not agree to this.”  
  
“You know the rules,” Illyana replied, her voice low and sexy. “Kitty’s off-world and you thought it was a good idea to show up here and try your telekinetic shit on me.”  
  
“Fuck—“ Grey’s words cut themselves off in a bout of laughing.  
  
Kitty phased a little further, making herself shadowy and transparent, and slipped through the wall into the inner room, in the corner where Illyana kept a tall bookshelf. Standing half inside the bookshelf, Kitty could be nearly invisible. Not that Grey couldn’t read her mind, but she seem very distracted at the moment.  
  
Grey was spread eagle on Illyana’s broad worktable, which had been pulled out from its place against the wall. Glowing violet magical cords stretched up from the floor, wrapping Grey’s wrists and ankles. Her hair fanned out, messy, her shirt half-unbuttoned. She had on jeans and boots, a white button-down over a darker bra, maybe red.  
  
And Illyana was leaning over her and … tickling her?  
  
Almost no one knew that Rachel Grey was somewhat ticklish, but once you got her started she became super ticklish. Almost no one dared get her started, though Kitty remembered a few epic tickle fights from their time in the tower together. She was on the edge of jealous that Illyana now knew this about Grey too.  
  
Illyana was in gray running shorts, black sports bra and tank top. She had her hair back in a ponytail. Had Grey really tried to surprise her in her sanctum after a run? Bold move. Kitty could start to see how Grey had gotten herself magically tied up with most of her clothes still on.  
  
Illyana bent down and kissed Grey while her fingers worked down the buttons of her shirt. When she got Grey’s shirt open, she pushed it wide and grinned down at the landscape of ribs and belly, and that bra! Kitty leaned forward, up on tip toe. Phoenix red demi-cups half covered in red lace that became the bra’s straps, highlighting Grey’s collarbones and shoulders in addition to the curve between her breasts.  
  
Illyana ran her fingers from the base of Grey’s throat to that deep curve and slipped one hand inside the bra. Grey’s head went back with a groan, her back arching, pushing her breast again Illyana’s hand.  
  
With her other hand, Illyana played fingertips up and down Grey’s ribs. She thrashed and laughed and swore.  
  
“You can do better than that,” Illyana teased.  
  
“You’re a fucking goat’s ass,” Grey gasped. “Stop it.”  
  
“You know your safeword, Prestige. Shame if you have to use it for tickling.” Her grin had a gleam of fang in it.  
  
She pushed one demi-cup down, cupped her hand under Grey’s breast and put her mouth on the already-tight nipple. Grey grabbed the lines of magic in her hands, arms taut, legs kicking, trying to get her heels against the table surface but slipping. The heavy, scarred table remained mostly smooth on its surface, though the thick legs held more than a few sword cuts, mysterious dents and burned patches.  
  
Illyana’s tail was out, having magically created a hole in her shorts, and it swished around her ankles, which meant both that she felt very safe and was completely turned on. Any self-consciousness and she’d have wrapped her tail around one of her own legs, trying to keep it still. Kitty had seen her tail enough over the years to have mapped its patterns and this was definitely not angry tail lashing and very much the broad pendulations that came from the intensity of Illyana’s sexual energy and need.  
  
In the next stage, there’d be some combination of the tip of her tail twitching and her wrapping the length of it around Grey. Kitty put her fingers against her hip, though she could barely feel it at this level of phasing. There was nothing quite like the feel of Illyana’s tail flicking against her skin—especially the involuntary twitches that happened when one or both of the got close to coming. Slow, irregular twitches meant Illyana was severely turned on … fast, flickering twitches meant she was about to come or trying very hard not to.  
  
And already Kitty could see a twitch of the tip of her tail at the end of some of its swings. Most of Illyana could play it cool, as she was now, but not her tail.  
  
While Kitty had been watching her tail, Illyana moved to Grey’s other breast, taking it out of its lacy, smooth cup and sucking until the nipple was deep red and straining. Then she trailed both hands down Grey’s ribs, fingers dancing as Grey kicked her legs.  
  
“I will fucking thrash you,” Grey growled in the midst of her forced laughter.  
  
“Then do it,” Illyana said, showing full fangs.  
  
She moved to Grey’s feet and pulled off one boot and sock, tickled, moved to the other foot and did the same. She ran her hands up the inside of Rachel’s legs, pressing thumbs to the upper creases of her thighs. Rachel stilled except for her heaving chest.  
  
“You like these jeans?” Illyana asked.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Illyana sighed, gestured with one hand and the bonds around Grey’s ankles disappeared. Grey brought her feet together, put them against Illyana’s chest and shoved, hard enough for her to stumble back and land on her ass.  
  
Smart move. Illyana couldn’t abide being hit, but shoving her didn’t count as hitting. She laughed, leapt up in a high, magic-enhanced arc, and came down on the worktable, straddling Grey’s legs. Her tail wrapped around Grey’s ankle, the tip tickling her sole. Illyana got the button of her jeans open and then her zipper. She tugged them over Grey’s hips, down to her knees. Then she called up a binding to go around both of Grey’s ankles, tying them together, and pulled the jeans down that far.  
  
With the jeans and the binding holding Grey’s legs together, Illyana crawled up her body and kissed her, hard, working her way down Grey’s neck and collarbones, nipping lightly with her fangs from the sounds Grey was making, spending a long time on her throat, collarbones, breasts, hands and mouth working, Grey’s voice faltering into low moans.  
  
“I bet you’re really wet now,” Illyana said and for a moment Kitty thought Illyana was speaking over her shoulder to her, because she was painfully aware of this affected her.  
  
During the quick-change in their suite, Kitty had put on the sleek, microfiber panties Illyana liked—because they were silky to the touch, but their cotton crotch showed wetness really well—plus leggings to be meeting-appropriate, and the white lace skirt that looked both proper and very improper depending on context. She thought about slipping her hand under her skirt but instead pressed her thighs together, turned a bit more solid, feeling how her wetness had already soaked into the fabric, sticking it close to her skin.  
  
But Illyana couldn’t have said that about Kitty. Even if she’d figured out that Kitty was going to come back early, she wouldn’t have known that Hank snared her for an emergency meeting. It hadn’t even been on the schedule.  
  
Illyana kissed and bit the tops of Grey’s thighs, the curve of her belly, her pubic mound with its trimmed red fuzz. She moved down to Grey’s ankles and gripped one.  
  
“You try to kick me and you won’t like what happens,” Illyana said.  
  
“Fuck off.” As soon as Illyana had Grey’s leg free of her jeans, Grey drew it back, readying a kick, but Illyana’s hand went with it, jerked it forward and pressed it to the table. Bindings wrapped the ankle and knee of that leg and then the other. Illyana pulled Grey’s jeans and panties off her other ankle, leaving her bare from the waist down.  
  
Raising her hands and drawing them slowly apart, Illyana directed the bindings to do the same with Grey’s legs, opening them as wide as the worktable's broad surface.  
  
Illyana scooted to the side of Grey, not blocking Kitty’s view at all. And it was quite a view. Grey was so wet that the outside of her lips and the tops of her thighs glistened.  
  
Illyana reached down and spread Grey’s lower lips wide. “You’re about dripping,” Illyana said. “What would Kitty say if she could see you like this?”  
  
Grey started blushing, the kind the spread up her neck and face, but also down toward her chest.  
  
“And look at your needy little clit,” Illyana said. She moved her finger up, spreading the top of Grey’s outer lips and bent down to tongue her clit from above.  
  
Was it Illyana’s uncanny intuition that had positioned them so perfectly? Kitty could see everything as Illyana leaned over Grey’s belly, her tongue stroking across Grey’s clit. The sensitive landscape under Illyana’s fingers and tongue shone with moisture, getting even more red and swollen.  
  
Illyana put a hand on the table, still leaning over Grey, and slid three fingers into Grey. She fucked her steadily for a minute, while the tip of her tail made erratic patterns against the floor.  
  
“Hear that,” Illyana said. “Your pussy is sucking on my fingers. That’s how bad you want it. What if Kitty could hear that?”  
  
Grey didn’t answer. She had her face turned away. Illyana pulled her hand out of Grey, glistening wet, and drew that thick moisture in a line from Grey’s blushing red throat down between her breasts. She went back for more wetness and painted in over one of Grey’s nipples until it looked glazed. Then the other. All the while her tail’s thrumming grew more irregular and insistent.  
  
What was it about this that turned her on so much? Grey’s helplessness? Her embarrassment? Her obvious arousal?  
  
“I don’t have any secrets from Kitty,” Grey snarled.  
  
“Good,” Illyana said, very low and slowly. She stroked Grey’s cheek, grabbed a fistful of her hair and drew her head up, facing Kitty. “Because she _is_ watching you.”  
  
Kitty saw her own shock mirrored on Grey’s face: mouth open, eyes wide, blush deepening. Grey closed her eyes and, as Illyana let go of her hair, turned her face away, but Kitty couldn’t stop looking.  
  
When Illyana had let go of Grey’s hair, she’d shifted that hand to Grey’s shoulder, gentle, steadying. Now she held her other hand out to Kitty. “You can hide behind me and watch if you want,” she said. “But will you come here so we can touch you? Do you want to?”  
  
Kitty took a step away from the bookcase, becoming solid. With every step her own hot wetness rubbed her lips and clit. She put her hand in Illyana’s and let herself be drawn close, against Illyana’s body, but also right next to Grey’s.  
  
Illyana had said “so we can touch you” and the bindings were gone from Grey’s wrists. She sat up and wrapped her arms around Kitty, shaking from embarrassment and arousal and too many emotions to name. Kitty felt a lot of those too and some others, maybe some new ones.  
  
“Do you want to hide behind me?” Illyana asked, voice smooth, only her tail giving her away. It had wrapped around Kitty’s calf and the tip fluttered against the inside of her knee.  
  
Kitty shook her head. Illyana kissed her neck, brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, pushed at Grey's shoulder until she leaned back on the table, braced up on one elbow. Gesturing to Grey, Illyana said, “She’s cute like that, don’t you think?”  
  
Kitty could only nod.  
  
“You’re too put together, _koschka_. Can I muss you?”  
  
Kitty nodded again.  
  
Illyana unbound her hair and let it down around her shoulders, touching the sides of her face and her throat, kissing her neck and the back of her neck. She moved behind Kitty and undid the buttons on her shirt until it hung open around her bra. Grey shrugged out of her own shirt and took off her bra. She leaned back again, one hand straying between her legs, not quite stroking, more thoughtful, maybe trying to hold herself together.  
  
“You can touch yourself,” Illyana growled. “But no coming yet. I don’t care how much you want it.”  
  
That last was punctuated by a twitch of Illyana’s hips, which Kitty could feel very clearly as they were pressed to her butt. With Grey reclined back on the table, Kitty couldn’t quite reach her breasts, so she stroked her fingers along Grey’s hip and thigh. The magical cords still bound Grey’s legs wide open. She’d pressed the base of her thumb against her clit, like she was trying to hold in her orgasm, but Kitty had a very clear view of her wet, red, obviously aching pussy.  
  
Illyana pulled Kitty’s shirt off, leaving only her bra and then pinching her nipples through the thin, white fabric.  
  
“Let me do that,” Grey said roughly. “I think we deserve to know how wet she got watching us.”  
  
Illyana growled her approval and took her hands off Kitty’s breasts. Telekinetic pressure replaced fingers, kneading and pinching, sending shocks along Kitty’s nerves and into her gut.  
  
Illyana bent enough to put a hand above Kitty’s knee and run it up under her skirt. “Leggings, good. Room for me in there,” she purred and slid her fingers under the waistband of Kitty’s leggings and panties. Kitty leaned back against Illyana as those fingers slipped down and found all the wetness gathering in her panties.  
  
“Oh, Grey, look, she’s soaking wet for us. Maybe even wetter than you.” Illyana pulled her fingers free and held them up, glistening. Then, grinning, she put them in her mouth.  
  
Grey made a needy, pained sound and licked her lips. Illyana went back into Kitty’s panties, taking her time, touching everywhere, until her fingers were soaked again. Then she brought them out and brushed her fingertips to Grey’s lips. Grey sucked on Illyana’s fingers, and Kitty leaned back on her, not sure that her knees would keep her up, Illyana’s other arm strong around her middle.  
  
When Kitty had her balance again, she bent forward to kiss Grey and taste herself on those burning lips. It had been a long time since they’d kissed. Decades. She had a moment of vertigo for how familiar-unfamiliar Grey’s lips felt on hers, and then they found a rhythm of lips and tongues, not quite as it had been, very good in a different way.  
  
Illyana rested her hands on Kitty’s hips while she and Grey made out, fingers strong and steadying, patient, letting the two of them learn each other again. Her tail stayed around Kitty’s leg, the tip now thrumming on her inner thigh.  
  
When they paused for breath, Illyana wrapped her hand around the back of Kitty’s hand, guided it further up Grey’s thigh and in, until Kitty’s fingertips reached wet and heat. Grey had fallen back on her elbows again, eyes wide and burning. Fingers of telekinetic sensation brushed over Kitty’s face, neck and throat. Illyana lay her index finger along the back of Kitty’s and slowly pressed both fingers forward, slipping easily into Grey’s wetness. Kitty pulled her hand back and extended her middle finger. Illyana, laughing darkly, did the same. Together, they slid four fingers together into Grey.  
  
Kitty curled her fingers up until she found that so sensitive spot inside, the spot that made Grey lie back on the table, arching up, gripping the sides. But Illyana kept moving her fingers in and out, deliberately out of sync with Kitty’s.  
  
_What did that feel like?_ Kitty wondered and the next second she felt it, broadcast from Grey’s mind and body: fullness, pulses of vibrant pressure from the tips of Kitty’s fingers when she dragged them forward, from Illyana’s knuckles, unpredictable and keeping Grey off-balance, unsure what to expect, forced to feel all of it, her clit straining like it would burst.  
  
Kitty had forgotten what it was like having a telepathic lover. If Illyana hadn’t still had an arm around her, she’d have crumpled to the floor, or phased through it.  
  
Illyana wasn’t part of the telepathy, wasn’t also feeling this, but definitely felt Kitty’s weight sagging against her. She grabbed a fistful of Kitty’s skirt and tugged it up. Illyana used one foot to gently kick the inside of Kitty’s ankle, getting her to step wider apart.  
  
“Grey, look,” Illyana said. “Tell me. How wet is she?”  
  
“Very. Soaking,” Grey said, gasping from the fingers still moving over each other inside of her. With effort she focused her eyes, caught her breath. “Big wet spot on her leggings so she’s definitely ruined her panties. They must be sopping. Dripping down to the leggings and probably running down her legs too.”  
  
“You think we should let her come before you do?” Illyana asked.  
  
Grey groaned.  
  
Illyana drew her fingers out of Grey, whispering to Kitty, “More.” The whisper wasn’t so Grey wouldn’t hear. It was for Kitty to feel hot breath against her ear and the roughness of Illyana’s voice. Kitty pulled far enough out of Grey to tuck her four fingers together and press in as deep as she could. Then she phased just the tips of her fingers and pulled them back, through the densely packed nerves and skin. Grey hollered and thrashed as much as the magic cords on her legs allowed, opening her legs wider, pushing down on Kitty’s hand.  
  
Illyana had both arms around Kitty now, one holding her while the fist that held up her skirt opened, slipped lower, closed again around the wet fabric of her leggings, pushing up into her crotch, making her feel Illyana’s hard knuckles covered by the soft, soaked material of her panties.  
  
Illyana’s tail unwound itself from Kitty’s leg and curved up along Grey’s body, flicking over her tight nipples while Kitty fucked her. It lashed and twitched, barely under Illyana’s control, working its way down Grey’s belly to her clit. Illyana’s panting became punctuated with grunts of need and frustration as she tried to settle her tail enough to rub Grey’s clit, but the best she could do was the let the tip lash around, hitting not only clit but pubic mound, belly, thighs and Kitty’s wrist.  
  
And Grey was coming anyway. Like a flaming meteor into Kitty’s brain. With no psychic shielding, she felt every burning trail of pleasure rising through Grey. She’d slumped forward, hand still inside, fucking lightly, as much as she could move in this overwhelming, white-hot fire. Grey’s muscles convulsing around her fingers, pushing wetness down her knuckles.  
  
Kitty knew she was soaking Illyana’s hand even more. She could almost feel her slick juices forced down between Illyana's strong fingers as Kitty rutted helplessly, desperately against her fist. Each time one of Illyana’s knuckles grazed her clit, she pushed Kitty's orgasm wider, higher. Illyana’s strong body at her back held her up, held her against Grey so they echoed off each other, each burst of pleasure in one setting off a response in the other.  
  
Grey relaxed first, going limp on the table, a few fluttering spasms inside her caressing Kitty’s fingers. Kitty sagged on top of her, letting her fingers slip out. Illyana's fist loosened, became a soft hand stroking and gentling her as she quivered.  
  
“My beautiful girls,” Illyana said softly, dreamily. Illyana undid the bindings on Grey’s legs and helped her sit at the edge of the table so she and Kitty and Grey could all hold onto each other and trade kisses, small caresses, happy murmurs.

Grey's naked, golden skin looked half alight with fire, warm but not burning. Kitty's bra had been pulled down to her waist where it met a very off-center skirt. And Illyana's running outfit looked surprisingly untouched except for the tail coming through the back of her short.  
  
Grey pulled Kitty’s face to her and kissed her, slowly, gently, pressed her forehead to Kitty’s and said, “I’m sorry. My plan was a lot more elegant than that but you surprised us. Was it too much to start with?”  
  
“No,” Kitty grinned. “I wanted to surprise you. And, I guess, to be surprised. And that was very … yes.” She peered at Illyana, meaning to check in, see if she was as okay as Kitty felt, but caught the smug look Illyana failed to hide. Illyana could be smug that this worked, but not that smug.

“You weren’t surprised?” Kitty asked her.  
  
Illyana turned her face away, but Kitty had seen the flash of victory on it.  
  
“You knew?!”  
  
Grey pushed back on the table enough to stare at Illyana, eyes blazing. “You _knew_? I thought you just sensed when she came in because of your magic.”  
  
Illyana stepped away from them and picked up Grey’s shirt, but Kitty took her elbow and turned her back around, asking, “How could you know? Hank pulled me into that meeting, you couldn’t have set that up. Does he know about this? Did he tell you?”  
  
“Not quite.”  
  
“You did _not_ teleport to the future over sex!” Kitty insisted.  
  
“These days that’s the only reason I ever do visit the future.”  
  
Grey hopped off the table and snatched her shirt out of Illyana’s hand. “You went to the future to find out when Kitty got back and didn’t tell me? You are such a shit. You planned all of this? You thought the first time—with Kitty—I should be spread out on your worktable like a fucking lunch buffet.”  
  
“That is _exactly_ what I thought,” Illyana said. “Are you sure you can’t read my mind?”  
  
“You insufferable self-righteous dick.” Grey’s words had too much respect in them to come across as a complete insult. “How did you plant the idea in my mind to come to your sanctum?”  
  
“I just jogged past your window. Twice.”  
  
“In that bra and top, okay, I see how that worked,” Grey said. Then, to Kitty, “Have you notice how we're both utter messes but somehow she still has all her clothes on?”  
  
A look passed between them, no need for telepathic words.  
  
Illyana backed away, hands up. “No, no, no.”   
  
“That’s not even close to your safeword, _duroschka_ ,” Grey said.  



End file.
